NATO chief says relations with Russia not similar to Cold War

Jens Stoltenberg

ANTALYA, May 13. /TASS/. Current relations between NATO and Russia cannot be characterised as the Cold War, the alliance's secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Wednesday.

"I think it's not a right thing to characterise the present situation as Cold War," Stoltenberg told a news briefing as part of a gathering of NATO foreign ministers in Anatalya, a Turkish resort city.

"We are not in the same situation as we were during the Cold War period after the Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991."

"During the Cold War we had two military blocs, NATO and the Warsaw Pact standing against each other and we also had an ideological fight between the two blocs and it involved actually the whole world," he said.

"But neither are we in the strategic partnership that we tried to develop between NATO and Russia," he added.

"We are in something which is different therefore we have to adapt our lines to a new security environment and that's exactly what we are doing," Stoltenberg said.